URLs du Jour

An insightful blog post from the wish-I-was-as-cool-as Nick
Gillespie; Nick analyzes, and mostly debunks a Politico
article discussing how big-L Libertarian candidates
could act as "spoilers" to GOP prospects. Sample:

Let it be noted that no third-party candidate anywhere ever cost
a major-party candidate an election. Have third-party candidates
gotten vote totals that more than cover the spread between the Dem
and the Rep? Of course.

But major-party candidates lose elections all on their own. If
they cannot close the deal with voters - even with all the
institutional advantages they possess - well, that's their problem.
Don't blame others for your own failure to woo voters.

Indeed, the whole spoiler thing tends to falls apart when you
look more closely. To wit, here's part of the discussion about the
Senate race in the Show-Me State, where a lackluster and thoroughly
undistinguished incumbent is facing a challenger whose basic grasp
of biology suggests he'd be a first-question washout on Are You
Smarter than a 5th Grader?:

… and I suggest you Read The Whole Thing™. (Maybe
if I bought a leather jacket, I'd be as cool as Nick? Nah, guess not.)

If you haven't already done so,
you gotta go to the Google today
and check out their homage to Winsor McCay, creator of Little
Nemo. (If you miss it today, you might be able to dig it
out of Google's doodle
archive, which I recommend.)

You might have heard about Argo, Ben Affleck's new movie. It's
supposed to be pretty good, and it's based on the real-life
story of the rescue of American embassy personnel from Iran
in 1980. The gimmick (revealed in the trailers) is that the
CIA's cover story to get into Iran is that they're making a sci-fi movie
titled Argo.

Well: it turns out that the fake movie Argo, was based
on Zelazny's Hugo-winning novel Lord of Light.

But (of course) they didn't make a movie based on Lord of
Light, either in 1980 or today. But there's a website devoted
to it, including some old artwork by the great comic book artist
Jack Kirby. Kirby's drawings were borrowed (the website says "stolen")
by the CIA to nail down the cover story.
Fascinating.

If Argo does well, maybe Affleck could get Lord of Light
made? Seems only fair.

That's not a bad batting average, but for a "Top 10 Greatest" list, it's
surprisingly awful.

There's something about a project of this sort that compels me to
finish it, so up comes The Disappeared by Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
(io9 actually recommends the whole series, and this is the chronological
first
in the series.)
Another loser, I'm afraid. But at least the Kindle version was
relatively inexpensive.

It is set mostly on the Moon, in a time when interactions between
humans and intelligent species are common enough
to set up legal rules for conflict resolution. And the rules
make Draco look like an ACLU card-carrier:
if you run afoul of an alien legal system, they get to do pretty
much whatever they want to you and your family. Tough darts, kid.

Unsurprisingly, there is a thriving market in
"disappearance" services,
which promise to extract you from your current
life, and set you up tracelessly as someone else, somewhere else,
all in order to escape
alien legal punishment.

The story here involves two lunar cops dealing with some thorny
cases where disappearance has been unsuccessful:
one race has kidnapped a couple kids to atone for
the sins of the parents;
another has slaughtered the passengers of a ship, who thought they
were being taken to safety; a third is looking to track down
a lady lawyer they hold responsible for the subsequent crimes
of a client she defended. It takes a Real Long Time for the cops to
figure things out: the disappearance service common to all three
cases has decided to make a little
more money by betraying their clients to the aliens.

Ms. Rusch is an amazingly prolific
professional writer, and won some awards, so you might
have better luck with her than I did. Her prose was (mostly)
professional, but lacked sparkle and failed to grab my interest. As the
book wore on, I got the feeling she was padding things to meet some
contractually-obligated word count. One chapter opens with a character
waking up to find his right foot asleep. But—ah—a few
sentences later, we discover "Only one side had fallen asleep. The other
side was just fine."

Good to know. The few fractions of a second I spent parsing that
are now gone, never to return.

There are also signs of shoddy editing. One guy says "I was never really
comfortable with the way we were flaunting the law." Another reflects
that he'd heard some bit of advice "from every single officer he'd
spoken too." If my unprofessional eye can catch such boners, there are
almost certainly others.
Fair or not, I hear the publisher saying:
Proofreading? Nah! Just get it out the door so the boobs can buy it.

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